Newsletter Archive: Spring 2007

Focus on CAFS Chairman: Robin Simon

Hogarth, France and All
That

In 1859-60 the young Edgar Degas occupied himself very profitably
by making drawings after engravings of Hogarth’s ‘modern moral subjects’: A
Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress,Marriage
A-la-Mode and The Four Times of the Day. He brought a peculiarly
French refinement of line to his studies, which are reminiscent of the great
draughtsmen of the eighteenth century and, indeed, of Watteau. Nothing could
have been more appropriate because, as I argue in my new book Hogarth, France
and British Art, Hogarth’s own art was founded upon
the most thorough appreciation of contemporary French art and
theory.

This is a paradox, in that Hogarth was vociferous in his apparent
contempt for all things French. On his visit to Paris in 1748 he
was recorded marching about like any modern football fan, shouting, ‘Their
houses are all gilt and beshit!’ Yet this is the same man
who was at pains to tell his young friends to be sure to visit
the studios of Chardin and La Tour the following year. Hogarth
was the first British artist to develop an export market in original
works of art, sending off sets of his engravings to collectors
in France accompanied by explanatory texts in French. Indeed, Hogarth’s
first recorded visit to Paris, in May-June 1743, was for the purpose
of hiring French engravers to create the prints after his new,
and exquisitely painted, series Marriage A-la-Mode.

The current Hogarth exhibition opened in Paris, where it was brilliantly
displayed. (The present Tate Britain exhibition is a larger version
of that shown in Paris.) I was lucky enough to give a public lecture
in the new auditorium of the Louvre on the subject of Hogarth’s
Paris visits, and proposed that when he went there in 1743 he would
have arrived clutching the first canvas of Marriage A-la-Mode.
There is sound technical evidence to back this up. The Louvre exhibition
was therefore the first occasion on which the initial canvas of Marriage
A-la-Mode had been in Paris for two hundred and sixty-three
years.

By the 1750s, Hogarth was much collected in France: the grand
panjandrum of the French art establishment, the Marquis de Marigny,
Mme de Pompadour’s younger brother, had a complete set. Hogarth’s
graphic works became part of the common visual language of Europe.
There was nothing unusual, then, in Degas’s copying from
the ‘progresses’; it was a familiar exercise. By the
twentieth century, however, Hogarth had vanished from the French
consciousness, and so the curators of the Louvre exhibition, Olivier
Meslay and Frédéric Ogee, were faced with a tricky
task. The imagination which they brought to their display meant
that French prejudices about this obscure British artist were simply
blown away. The show was one of the most successful ever mounted
by the Louvre. Hogarth, after so many years, had returned: and
taken Paris by storm.

Robin Simon
MA 1971 – Chairman CAFS

Robin Simon’s book Hogarth, France and British
Art: The rise of the arts in eighteenth-century Britain, is
published by Paul Holberton Publishing.